2024 is L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday! The L.M. Montgomery Institute (LMMI) at the University of Prince Edward Island is celebrating with 150 tributes – celebratory statements or greetings – that reflect upon personal connections to Montgomery or on an aspect of her life, work, or legacy.
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This week we are celebrating Mother’s Day with tributes that recognize the importance of motherhood to Montgomery and her readers. Margaret E. MacNeill, Andrea Richards, Rita Bode, Daniella Dedekind, and Ewa Henry-Dawson speak to motherhood in all its different forms.
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A tribute to grandmothers from Margaret E. MacNeill
Grandmothers occupy special places in our hearts.
Lucy Maud Montgomery crafted complicated maternal relationships in her stories and real life. After Maud’s mother died, Grandmother Lucy Woolner Macneill (spelled with a lower-case “n”) adopted unexpected roles. She suddenly became grand/mother, mentor, and foe. This reality was later echoed in Maud’s depiction of Marilla in Anne of Green Gables. Like Maud’s grandmother, Marilla became caregiver to a feisty ward. Ultimately, Grandmother Macneill’s postmaster and church chores built a village hub where Maud and a literary society thrived.
My childhood summers were spent in Cavendish and winters in “Avonlea.” Reading about Anne’s shenanigans in Maud’s books, and receiving Grandma Maggie MacNeill’s letters, kept the magic of Cavendish alive. Grandpa Alvah MacNeill (Maud’s distant cousin) was a skilled storyteller. He spoke; Grandma wrote. Thankfully, Cavendish women were voracious readers and writers: their words still connect us across space and time.
Happy 150th Birthday Maud ~ Happy (Grand)Mother’s Day!
Margaret Elise MacNeill is an Associate Professor Emerita of Health Media and Cultural Studies, Faculty of KPE, University of Toronto. Her Grandfather Alvah Judson MacNeill (1889-1980) and Grandmother Margaret Jane MacNeill (nee Orr, 1892-1985) lived on the MacNeill farm and homestead in Cavendish. Alvah was a younger distant cousin to L.M. Montgomery.
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A tribute to grandmothers, mothers, and stepmothers from Andrea Richards
Whatever her maternal inadequacies, Lucy Macneill, L.M. Montgomery’s grandmother, abetted Maud’s educational pursuits against the wishes of most of the family, which helped shape the writer’s work, including her view of mothering. Her journals and stories celebrate the wonder of biological motherhood but also revere motherhood chosen through adoption and depict stepmothers who defy fairytale tropes to seek happy endings. Beyond the idealized, she gives us company as we face the inevitable mourning of maternity, whether from death or the bittersweet separation as a child becomes an independent adult. She reminds us that as family, friends, neighbours, and teachers, we wield the power to limit or expand dreams as we mother through seeing, hearing, and responding to a soul of any age, especially to children.
Happy Birthday, and thanks, Maud, for inspiring my mothering! Thanks to my mother and grandmothers for giving me my first “Anne” books and my wings.
Andrea Richards is a university writing/rhetoric instructor who is happiest in nature, in the classroom, and with her children and grandchildren.
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A tribute to Montgomery’s depictions of motherhood from Rita Bode
Among the many insightful articulations that have moved me in Montgomery’s writings is this one: A few months after the birth of Chester, her first-born, she writes in her Journal: “Always when I read of a child being neglected or ill-used, I would thrill with indignation and horror. But now I can scarcely endure to read such a thing because of the anguish it causes me—for in every child I see my own child—and I picture him undergoing that. I have cried aloud at the pain that came with such a picture” (CJ 3:73). Her words speak to the joy and pain of motherhood, but also to the condition of children. They are child-centred expressing the terrible vulnerability of the young which her fiction presents at times with humour, at other times with grief, but consistently with understanding and compassion.
Rita Bode is professor of English Literature at Trent University.
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A tribute to feminine companionship from Daniella Dedekind
I open the cocoa-splattered, tatty book. Hand-written – hand-scrawled – memories of sensory pleasure: spicy, sugary, crunchy, hearty, homey. I open my mother’s falling-apart recipe book. In it are generations of recipes, passed on from great-grandmothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, friends, daughters, and daughters-in-law. A whole museum of feminine companionship.
You, too, held such a collection – a testimony to your own experiences of motherhood, of sisterhood, of friendship, of love. And when I open Anne of Green Gables, The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook, and then also Aunt Maud's Recipe Book, I share in these experiences. I find recipes to add to my own cocoa-splattered, tatty, hand-written recipe book. Liniment cake (with vanilla this time) made for birthdays, raspberry tarts for Sunday afternoon fun, ice cream that tastes of clouds … I open these books and I find comfort; I find love; I find motherhood.
An avid cook and baker, Daniella Dedekind is currently completing her MA at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where she is studying the link between food and identity in Montgomery’s work. @daniellasigriddedekind
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A tribute to surrogate mothers from Ewa Henry-Dawson
L.M. Montgomery intimately understood the ache of loneliness, having been orphaned by her mother and abandoned by her father before she turned two. Her grief and sense of longing deeply influenced both her life and her literary works. Throughout her novels, she depicted children grappling with the absence of their mothers due to death or illness. I feel a deep personal connection and gratitude to Maud for her portrayal of surrogate mothers who lovingly fill this emotional void.
Susan Baker, the Ingleside housekeeper, with “her weathered hands,” would sacrifice her life for the Blythe children. Judy Plum, the devoted servant at Silver Bush, offered Pat Gardiner unwavering love and understanding. And most of all, my beloved Marilla Cuthbert gave Anne Shirley, the famous orphaned redhead, love, home, and a profound sense of belonging at Green Gables. Through her writing, Montgomery pays beautiful homage to many diverse forms of motherhood.
Ewa Henry-Dawson is a Polish-Canadian visual artist and an independent scholar deeply passionate about the life and writing of L.M. Montgomery, especially her journals.
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Tributes next week will celebrate Emily of New Moon’s birthday.